The dismissal of white women by the Clinton camp as self-loathing, sexist robots is another effort at avoidance. The Democratic leadership and consultants proved out-of-touch with the public despite polls that gave ample indication that Clinton was the worst possible candidate to put forward in this anti-establishment period. Nevertheless, the Democrats appear to be rallying around again many of the same leaders and the Clinton family (including reportedly grooming Chelsea as the new “brand” name candidate). The position of aides like McIntosh is that the fault is that white women simply did not listen or learn. It was not the message or the candidate or her campaign. It is a remarkably insulting spin but it seems to be preferred to the more difficult questions raised by the campaign.

***********************

We recently discussed how, within minutes of the loss on election night, Clinton aides began to spin the loss and entirely the fault of FBI Director James Comey — a spin picked up by Clinton herself the next day. Many of us have questioned that spin in light of Clinton’s long-standing low polls on truthfulness and her ranking as (with Trump) the most unpopular nominee of a major party for the presidency. Now, former Clinton campaign communications director Jess McIntosh has come up with a new culprit. Of course, it is not the Democratic establishment that engineered the nomination despite ample warning signs in the polls. It was not the campaign that preferred spin to honesty at every turn. And it was not the candidate herself. No, it was the self-loathing and inherent sexism of women.

In an appearance on MSNBC (which seems at times to be moving through the stages of grieving of Kübler-Ross), McInstosh insisted that the problem was with sexist, self-hating women: “Internalized misogyny is a real thing and this is a thing we have to be talking about as we go through and see.” She added “We as a society react poorly to women seeking positions of power. We are uncomfortable about that and we seek to justify that uncomfortable feeling because it can’t possibly be because we don’t want to see a woman in that position of power. As we go through these numbers, as we figure out exactly what happened with turnout, it seems to be white college-educated women . . . We have work to do talking to those women about what happened this year and why we would vote against our self-interest.”

Of course, there could be a more obvious answer: people really did not like Hillary as a leader regardless of her gender. It may be that the large numbers of women refused to vote for Hillary simply because she was a woman. Clinton and Trump were the most unpopular politicians ever to be nominated for president and over 60 percent of voters viewed Clinton as fundamentally dishonest. None of that stopped the DNC from engineering her victory over Bernie Sanders who presented precisely the populist campaign that many voters were looking for. Clinton had the Democratic establishment and many allies in the media — everyone agreed except the public. That was enough . . . until the voters had their say on November 8th.

McIntosh’s statement reflects what turned off a lot of women that I spoke with. The Clinton campaign hammered away at different groups “voting their interests” and specifically drum beat the notion that women had to support Clinton as the first possible female president. It was all about “self-interest.” That pitch itself can be viewed as sexist. Many women did not trust Clinton and saw nothing in her that spoke to their lives or the difficulties of their families. Notably, Clinton was losing among various female groups to Sanders in the primary. Again, Clinton staffers spoke of educating women to see their self-interest, but tended to avoid the anomaly of running female-centric themes without the support of most women. For many women and men, picking a president is not about “self-interest” but the best for their country and their families.

According to the New York Times, Clinton carried only 54 percent of the female vote against Donald Trump. However, nearly twice as many white women without college degrees voted for Trump than for Hillary and she basically broke almost even on college-educated white women (with Hillary taking 51 percent). Trump won the majority of white women at 53 percent.

The dismissal of white women by the Clinton camp as self-loathing, sexist robots is another effort at avoidance. The Democratic leadership and consultants proved out-of-touch with the public despite polls that gave ample indication that Clinton was the worst possible candidate to put forward in this anti-establishment period. Nevertheless, the Democrats appear to be rallying around again many of the same leaders and the Clinton family (including reportedly grooming Chelsea as the new “brand” name candidate). The position of aides like McIntosh is that the fault is that white women simply did not listen or learn. It was not the message or the candidate or her campaign. It is a remarkably insulting spin but it seems to be preferred to the more difficult questions raised by the campaign.

ALEPPO, Syria — In the midst of sectarian violence that has overtaken Syria for more than five years, nine-year-old Asil Kassab is shocked by the defeat of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

“I am so unhappy that a woman was not elected President,” Asil said, briefly ducking as a bomb from an American MQ-1 Predator drone leveled the hospital behind her. “Hillary Clinton is truly a role model for young girls like me. I was so hoping that she’d be the one to order the drone strike that would inevitably end my life.”

“I don’t put much stock in the misogynist agenda of American politics,” said Kassab, who, like many children, cannot remember a time before the war that has killed 400,000 people, including her family, and created over 4.7 million refugees. “People will always criticize her because she is a woman in a man’s world; One who has the audacity to run for President.”

“It is sexism that motivates her critics, plain and simple,” she added. “It is sexism, and racism, that caused her to lose the election!”

Huma Abedin, vice chairwoman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, took a moment from sobbing into a pile of shredded emails to applaud the statement made by young Asil.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign admitted she was “hypocritical” on the issue of equal pay, according to new emails released by Wikileaks.

The Washington Free Beacon has reported extensively on the gender pay gap for Clinton’s staff while she was a senator, secretary of state, and in her current campaign. Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook acknowledged paying women less was problematic for his candidate who has continued to make the issue central to her campaign.

“This is the problem with having big chunks of research locked away…we just don’t know what’s going to be coming at us,” Mook wrote John Podesta in the aftermath of the New York Times story revealing Clinton’s use of a private email account.

“I worry we’re going to get out on a limb on certain issues (perfect example: equal pay) and not realize how hypocritical we might look later,” he said.

“I hate to sound like we’re trying to get into all her dirty laundry and I completely understand all the sensitivities, but this is the big leagues and we need comms and reserach experts preparing us [sic],” Mook added. “Consultants are all a flutter as you can imagine! But I know that this is a special world we live in…”

Mook’s comments appeared on the same email chain where he said he believed “everything was taken care of” in the summer of 2014 regarding Clinton’s private email server.

Other emails revealed the Clinton team’s concern about reports that she paid women just 72 cents on the dollar paid to men, causing the campaign to poll test whether the issue hurt her image in Iowa.

The campaign has confirmed the accuracy of the Free Beacon’s report that Clinton’s male senate staffers received a median salary $15,708.38 higher than women.

The U.S. director of national intelligence and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security have accused “Russia’s senior-most officials” of hacking and leaking emails posted to Wikileaks and other sites in order to influence the 2016 election.

Hillary Clinton supporters are employing a tried-and-true defense in the wake of the renewed FBI investigation into the Democratic presidential nominee’s emails: It’s “sexist.”

Writing in Time magazine, University of California, Berkeley linguistics professor Robin Lakoff described the investigation into the private server Mrs. Clinton used while secretary of state as a “bitch hunt.”

“I am mad,” Ms. Lakoff wrote. “I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us.

“The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female,” she wrote. “Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere.

“Clinton has repeatedly apologized, but apparently not enough for her accusers,” the professor continued. ”In fact, her apologies were her only mistake. By apologizing she acknowledged guilt. But that’s what women are supposed to do (because women are always guilty of something). ”

National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates echoed that sentiment, arguing that the investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server compromised national security interests is “sexist.”

If the former secretary of state’s emails are subject to FBI scrutiny, Ms. Oates said, then so should those of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

FBI director James Comey announced Friday that the bureau is taking another look at Mrs. Clinton’s email practices, after investigators found 650,000 emails on a laptop purportedly belonging to disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of top Clinton confidant Huma Abedin.

The emails were reportedly uncovered in a separate probe into the possibility that Mr. Weiner sent sexually lewd messages to a teenage minor.

Earlier this week Nate Silver reported that if only men voted Trump’s already won. That is, to say women are voting in greater percentages for Clinton and men for Trump. Here’s his astonishing chart:

“If men were the only voters, conversely, we’d have to subtract 10 points from Clinton’s current margin in every state — which would yield an awfully red map. Trump would win everything that could plausibly be called a swing state, with Clinton hanging on only to the West Coast, parts of the Northeast, Illinois and New Mexico. That would yield 350 electoral votes for Trump to 188 for Clinton:”

This may well explain the Clinton effort to schlep before the cameras every woman who is willing to accuse Trump of making advances toward them no matter how flimsy, tardy and improbable the charge.

Hillary who asserted on her website HillaryClinton.com that women who claimed to have survived sexual assault “have the right to be believed” scrubbed that as Trump reminded voters of her husband’s depredations against women.

Christina Jeffrey notes in correspondence how the term “sexual assault” has been stretched beyond rational meaning when it suits the left to do so:

Our side has done a good job of pointing out what real sexual assault looks like, so just for fun, I think I’ll take up what the PC crowd wants to fight. Fighting rape and real sexual assault in the inner cities and by predatory older males against middle and high school students is difficult and the statistics tend to stigmatize African-American males. So the P.C. crowd goes after the kind of “sexual assault” that is often quite benign and part of semi-modern/traditional courtship rituals.

Political Correctness has invaded every aspect of our lives; but the area where it is now being felt most intensely is in the sexual realm. While pushing “Kiddie Porn” to K-4 students as “health education,” and making statements in the press like this one: “girls have to get used to seeing male genitalia” as a defense for transgendered locker rooms” (paraphrased, but not inaccurately), the PC education crowd insists that college women are constantly at risk of “sexual assault.” If you properly define “sexual assault” as rape or intent to rape, college campuses are actually among the safest places for women of college age. If that were not true, no one would pay $50,000 or more to let their precious daughters attend college. And those of us who teach on these campuses, and are close to our students, would be aware that our women students were being constantly “assaulted.”

When it suits them to do so they are perfectly willing to claim that a hug or kiss is a “sexual assault” in the absence of a notarized statement of consent.

My Facebook friend Lynn Chu apparently concurs with this analysis,” The invention of this term, and its misuse, was a deliberate propaganda effort to blur harmless romance including clumsiness or episodes gone awry often while both parties at colleges are drunk, with actual rape for which a prosecution and conviction would lie. The courts know how to do this, and universities and colleges do not. ”

Now they are trying to use such an expansion to cover dubious claims, often contested by other witnesses, about Trump.

We’ve seen such sexual propaganda before in the Duke and University of Virginia “rape” cases.

The young women whom these charges are designed to influence are astonishingly ill-informed as this tape of some of them who are for repealing women’s suffrage under the misguided belief that it means “suffering” or something reveals:

That some Republican politicians have backed off supporting Trump because of these allegations — again underscoring my contempt for the white-togaed ninnies who also rankle Katie Hopkins at the Daily Mail:

Fearful for their own political future, deserting Republican politicians have spoken of not being able to look their daughter in the eye and still back Trump, despite having made him the party’s nominee.

Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, said ‘women should be championed or revered, not objectified’.

For the record, I never want to be either of those two things. I am not a charitable cause. Being championed makes me sound incapable. And I certainly don’t want to be revered — that’s one step away from being embalmed in holy oil.

John McCain has jumped ship, too. Trying to swim away from the candidate nominated by his party, who has been entirely consistent in his campaign in saying things more sensitive souls find hard to hear.

Predictably the founder of Everyday Sexism was wheeled out from her feminist lair to reinforce Trump as a monster, applauded wildly by young women who need a trigger warning before they read Watership Down.”

She concludes the charges are “no worse than the Hillary-voting, smug rape-culture rappers who like to hang out at the Obama White House while peddling vile lyrics to kids that would make Trump blush.”

Michelle Obama claims that the offending Trump locker room boasts to Billy Bush which NBC sat on until now “shocked her to her core”. Perplexingly, she has also said she considers the half dressed, obscene singer and dancer Beyoncé a “role model” for her daughters.

Michelle’s husband’s display of his erect manhood before a planeload of women reporters none of who to my knowledge reported the incident and who now are getting all Victorian further suggests sexual vulgarity is not unknown to the Obama family.

Back in 2008, at least a portion of the below video of Obama flaunting himself did appear on CNN’s website.

However, no media coverage made any reference to lewdness. There was just reference to the unremarkable news that Obama was… wearing jeans.

CNN captioned the clip with only what follows, which Michelle Malkin and Allahpundit took note of at the time:

It appears that the portion of the video that would have created a firestorm had been circumsized by CNN editors.”

I haven’t forgotten either when the left talked about Paula Jones as “trailer trash” when she successfully charged Hillary’s husband with real sexual misconduct or when Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin were called “c*nt” without press or Democratic rebuke. Everything, it seems, is relative. Women of the left are to be treated with care. Those in opposition are disrespected every possible way.

As tawdry as all this is, it has to be answered so if you are offended, I apologize, but there’s no sheltering behind good taste when mud is being slung by people whose record for sleaze and aggression is boundless.

Hypocrisy is a painful thing to watch. It’s beyond laughable to watch the biased media culture and all the Hillary-supporting politicians go Puritanical when it comes to sex. The morally righteous never had this problem with Bill Clinton, and they don’t have a problem with Hillary’s mind-numbing evasiveness when it comes to partnering with one of the highest profile sexual predators of all time.

Hypocrisy is a symptom. People are hypocrites only when they’re evading something big. What the Clintonistas try to hide is they care about only one thing: Power. They don’t care about respect for women, because to respect women you first have to respect individuality. Their entire lives have been based on the acquisition of political power and the millions of dollars they receive when that power is peddled and sold on the government market. They care nothing for the preservation of individual rights. They care only about rewarding their donors and advancing their socialist causes.

As for career politicians like John McCain and Paul Ryan, why should anyone care what they think? They are nothing more than managers for the collapsing imperial state. Their squandering of America’s Constitution and fiscal future for the sake of their own power trips makes Trump’s sleazy comments seem like nothing in comparison.

[snip]

If you want to make the case for NOT voting for Donald Trump, you have to get real. This tape is the least plausible reason you can find. And if you’re not voting for Donald Trump, be prepared to defend why you did your part to let an actual criminal and lawbreaker — Hillary Clinton — become president.

The issue is more than hypocrisy; it is allowing such stupid distractions to keep us from focusing on the real threats to our lives. Wretchard T Cat (Richard Fernandez) is on target:

The most astonishing thing is that nobody’s hiding anything any more. The Russians are openly stealing information; Wikileaks is blatantly distributing it. America’s enemies are opening fire, banners flying at American warships. The Obama administration is frankly buying the silence or quiescence of enemies with public money. At the same time he’s got so many secret wars going on you can lose count. The Clintons have got a cash drop set up in the middle of Main Street.

The press is openly rooting for Hillary. Heck the UN wants her to win and isn’t shy about saying so. ISIS is taking video, video of atrocities. It’s like they don’t care. It’s like nobody cares. All pretense, all decorum are gone.

The only people who care are the GOP leaders who are shocked, shocked that candidates are using bad language. But they’re like Temperance League biddies in saloon with a fight going on.

The whole spectacle is taking place in plain view and the most miraculous thing is that everyone pretends not to notice and keep drinking even while they dodge flying chairs and spittoons.

The show must go on. Whatever happens the show must go on.

David Gelernter argues we’ve become emasculated by the left in an article which I urge you all to read in its entirety, Here’s the money shot for his argument that Hillary must be stopped:

Trump voters have noticed that, not just over Mr. Obama’s term but in recent decades, their own opinions have grown increasingly irrelevant. It’s something you feel, like encroaching numbness. Since when has the American public endorsed affirmative action? Yet it’s a major factor in the lives of every student and many workers. Since when did we decide that men and women are interchangeable in hand-to-hand combat on the front lines? Why do we insist on women in combat but not in the NFL? Because we take football seriously. That’s no joke; it’s the sad truth.

Did we invite the federal bureaucracy to take charge of school bathrooms? I guess I missed that meeting. The schools are corrupt and the universities rotten to the core, and everyone has known it since the 1980s. But the Democrats are owned by the teachers unions, and Republicans have made only small-scale corrections to a system that needs to be ripped out and carefully disposed of, like poison ivy.

The Emasculated Voter to whom no one pays any attention is the story of modern democracy. Instead of putting voters in charge, we tell them they’re in charge, and it’s just as good. That’s the Establishment’s great discovery in the Lois Lerner Age.

Enter Mr. Trump. People say he became a star because he just happened to mention an issue that just happened to catch on. But immigration is the central issue of our time. Trump voters zeroed in because they saw what most intellectuals didn’t. What is our nation and what will it be? Will America go on being America or turn into something else? That depends on who lives here — especially given our schools, which no longer condescend to teach Americanism.

To reclaim your country and your virility — assuming Nate Silver is right — take all your male friends to the polls. It’s the least you can do for your country.

When Senator Bob Packwood, a pro-abortion Republican who won the Margaret Sanger award from Planned Parenthood, got in trouble for groping women, Hillary complained about his accusers. “HC tired of all those whiney women, and she needs him on health care,” a friend of Hillary’s wrote.

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“I am asking you to join me in supporting Bob Filner for Mayor,” the sleazy voice of Bill Clinton on the answering machine greeted San Diego residents. “As President, I worked with Bob.” During her first run for the White House, Hillary Clinton said that she looked forward to working with Filner.

Filner had impeccable credentials. His father was a Communist and he had been a Freedom Rider and a member of the Progressive Caucus. His ties to the Clintons went back a long way and he had passionately spoken out in defense of President Clinton during the impeachment debate.

He even had all the right left-wing “street” connections from J Street to Occupy Wall Street.

Planned Parenthood accused his Republican opponent of being part of the “War on Women” and claimed that, “For twenty years, Bob Filner has defended women… our right to choice, our right to healthcare, our right to equal pay.”

Bob Filner, like Bill Clinton, was also a serial sexual predator. His victims included a 67-year old grandmother and sexual assault victims who had come to him seeking help. He locked his executive assistant in the kitchen and demanded that they “make love.” His favorite move involved putting the women he targeted in a headlock.

Bill Clinton’s nickname was “Slick Willie.” Bob Filner’s was “Filthy Filner.” It wasn’t hard to see why Bill had backed Bob. Bill’s own idea of romance looked a lot like Bob’s. The stories told by Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones, Bill’s accusers, bear a striking similarity to those of Bob’s accusers.

While Bill’s history of sexual assault is widely known, the Clintons have always been comfortable with sexual predators. Hillary Clinton described Senator Ted Kennedy, who had murdered one woman and assaulted many more, as a “champion for women.” One woman recalls being “championed” by Ted Kennedy as he threw her onto a table, breaking glass and crystal, before molesting her. The other member of that party, Senator Chris Dodd, recently endorsed Hillary Clinton. Hillary’s website boasts that she “collaborated closely with Senator Chris Dodd.” Probably not as closely as his victims.

Hillary’s champions for women are more likely to be champions of abusing women.

But Hillary has always been cold-blooded when it comes to her political allies abusing women. When Senator Bob Packwood, a pro-abortion Republican who won the Margaret Sanger award from Planned Parenthood, got in trouble for groping women, Hillary complained about his accusers. “HC tired of all those whiney women, and she needs him on health care,” a friend of Hillary’s wrote.

A few years ago, Joe Biden praised Packwood at the DNC’s Women’s Leadership Forum as the good kind of Republican. Considering Biden’s creepy history of touching women, that’s not surprising. But, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote of Packwood’s left-wing allies, “The feminists tried to protect him at first… even though he had the hilarious gall to jump on an abortion lobbyist.”

Just as they had tried to protect Bill Clinton, Bob Filner, Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden and so many others. Joe Biden’s own creepy habits have been fondly joked about in the media. Just Joe being Joe.

But Hillary Clinton has played ball for worse predators than these. Her most disturbing cover-up didn’t involve email, but pedophilia by a powerful donor.

Howard Gutman was highly active in Democratic politics and a longtime Clinton donor. That helped get him a slot as the Ambassador to Belgium. There a Diplomatic Security agent wrote that he had solicited “sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children.”

Howard Gutman wasn’t the worst individual Clinton donor. That honor went to Jeffrey Epstein and his “Lolita Express” which ferried visitors to “Orgy Island.” Epstein claimed to have co-founded the Clinton Foundation.

When he wasn’t helping the Clintons, he was accused of “buying” underage girls. Some of the girls were as young as 12-years old. Investigators found evidence that, “Epstein’s staff was frequently working to schedule multiple young girls between the ages of 12 and 16 years old literally every day, often two or three times per day.”

But the most monstrous abusers of women, who also happen to be pals of the Clintons, are in the Middle East. The Middle Eastern Muslim countries with the worst records on human trafficking also kicked in nearly $100 million to the Clinton Foundation. And it’s not just American women being lured to Riyadh or Dubai with promises of modeling contracts. Saudi princes and their entourages have assaulted women from Manhattan to Beverly Hills.

Instead of standing up for abused women in Saudi Arabia, Hillary Clinton stood with their abusers.

Hillary Clinton spoke at Dar El-Hekma College and was introduced by Saleha Abedin, its founder. Clinton praised Abedin, the mother of Huma Abedin, her chief-of-staff, and the author of a book justifying female genital mutilation and claiming that women have no right to refuse their husbands.

King Abdullah had 30 wives and held 4 of his own daughters hostage. Under his regime, rape victims were more likely to be punished than rapists. After the Saudi tyrant’s death, the Clinton Foundation put out a press release from Bill and Hillary praising his progressive attitude toward women. This was the ruler of a country where women were not allowed to drive or leave the house without a male guardian. Hillary’s own State Department had rated Saudi Arabia as a Tier 3 country, the worst possible level, on its trafficking report. The Kingdom was deemed one of the largest human traffickers in the world.

What did Hillary Clinton do about this? She went on taking more Saudi money.

Some of the country’s worst abusers of women and the world’s worst abusers of women found that the Clintons would be their friends as long as they could help them get what they wanted. That is as true of donors and politicians as it is of Middle Eastern monsters.

The media has largely turned a blind eye to the constellation of abusers and predators who have been associated with the Clintons. Instead Hillary Clinton, who targeted the women abused by her husband, has been praised as a defender of women’s rights based on the words she read from a teleprompter.

The Clintons talk a lot. They contradict themselves every other week. But it’s what they do that counts. It’s their actions and their alliances that show who and what they truly are.

When it came to the War on Women, the Clintons fought on the side of the abusers.

(Perhaps interestingly, The Federalist seems to post more articles of the Never Trump genre than anything approaching Pro Trump articles. — DM

Smut in service to a good cause is fine with the great and the good. All the handwringing and shrieks of distaste over Trump’s swaggering has nothing to do with the sorry content of his bluff. It is simply a minesweeper to clear a path for the looming obscenity of another Clinton presidency.

**************************

We are no longer drifting Left. The polls tell us we are hurtling hard-left on class warfare rhetoric and its handmaiden, gender demagoguery. Meanwhile, networks and pundits are in a frenzy to tut-tut over Donald Trump’s jock-strap bravado.

You want locker room talk? Forget Trump. His old-style cisgender crudity is as outdated as a codpiece. On a bus that fateful day 11 years back, he did not know that “pussy” was not getting grabbed any more. No, the grabbing had been going the other way for a full decade by then.

Dirty talk acquired cultural cachet some 20 years ago when it wrapped itself in the banner of female empowerment. Eve Ensler updated a seamy genre with “The Vagina Monologues” and got a Tony Award for it. Her vulgarity won an Obie for Off-Broadway excellence in 1996 and subsequently earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Ensler repackaged soft-core discourse and marketed it as an achievement for women’s voices. Girly smut emerged as a tool to combat violence against women. A supposed kick in the groin to misogynistic oppression, “The Monologues” were hailed in the New York Times as a significant piece of political theatre. The format consisted of a series of soliloquys, each with its own thematic caption. A few samples: “Reclaiming Cunt”; “The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy”; “My Angry Vagina”; and my very favorite: “The Little Coochie Snorker That Could.”

Trump’s attention was directed to grown women. Ensler, by contrast, was not above making copy out of an interview with a six-year-old girl. She asked the child to describe her vagina—sight and smell—and to tell what it might say if it could talk. (Simply explaining that makes me wince more than anything on the Trump tapes.)

Ensler acquired standing as a feminist heroine with a desire to bring “a culture of vaginas” into the light: “. . . to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humour, to make them visible.” Her eulogizing runs along anthropomorphized lines like this: “The heart is capable of sacrifice. So is the vagina.”

The Vaginas Are Still Talking

But this is old news now, yes? No, unhappily, it is not. “The Monologues” endure. Each year brings a new version, addressing the latest issue on which vaginas have something to say. (2004 featured an all-transgender cast, each chattering vagina played by an altered male. Ventriloquism sells.) Ensler’s magnum opus remains a staple in popular productions by amateur actors in local colleges and community centers.

Anywhere that men gather is a mission territory for evangelists of the vagina. This past May, after a run in several women’s prisons, it was time to bring the act to two men’s prisons. Quartz, an online venture of Atlantic Media, publisher of The Atlantic,covered the event at Queensboro Correctional Facility in Long Island City. The article opens:

‘My vagina is angry!’ a woman’s voice loudly echoed through a large gym at a minimum security prison in Queens, New York. Minutes later, the gasping and moaning of an imitated orgasm filled the space, accompanied by the loud, uncomfortable laughter and knee slapping of the men in the audience.

To prepare inmates to re-enter society, the productions all-female cast, including two former female prisoners, held forth on sexual pleasure and sexual violence:

They heard detailed descriptions of the female anatomy, of visiting the gynecologist’s office, and of being abused.

The men laughed, throwing their heads back when they heard actors unabashedly spitting out descriptions of vaginas: ‘New Jersey twat,’ ‘split knish,’ ‘poonani,’ or when they saw them mime examining their private parts in a mirror. They shook their heads in disbelief when hearing about genital mutilation of young girls. Every once in a while a guard’s walkie-talkie would go off, reminding everyone of their place.

Smut in service to a good cause is fine with the great and the good. All the handwringing and shrieks of distaste over Trump’s swaggering has nothing to do with the sorry content of his bluff. It is simply a minesweeper to clear a path for the looming obscenity of another Clinton presidency.